Limehouse Nights

This is a story about ‘An Other Story’. A story within a story. Inspired by the history of Chinese immigration to London, a very talented and interesting friend of mine, James Yeatman, wrote and directed the exhilarating Limehouse Nights, an unflinching examination of race-related drug issues in 1918 Limehouse now playing in East London. I am no trained theatre critic, so this is not a review, nor is it a shameless sales-pitch, simply a referenced reason that forms the inspiration behind this series of thoughts. A play of irony, featured less ironically in Limehouse Town Hall, Yeatman’s writing picks up on the dark fascination that Chinatown became for many English, the opening scene featuring a ‘tour of Chinatown’ where its Chinese residents become the objects of bemusement, stared at and photographed like tourist attractions.

Of course, the title may be familiar. And this is for good reason. Thomas Burke’s writing on Chinatown didn’t quite have the international currency of some of his predecessors, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu for example, but his first successful publication of the same name played on this exotic myth of violent and sexual interaction between working-class English men and their Chinese neighbours, profiting from the orientalist attitude of British readers who liked to imagine themselves as ‘at one’ with the exotic, searching for ‘that other’. Not pour les jeunes, Burke’s Limehouse Nights is full of both heart wrenching tales of basic human emotion, the heart as it is, and imagined terror. Of course this was based on a healthy mix of melodrama and gritty realism, yet it seems to end with a romanticised and poetic view of a heavily stereotyped opium-drenched Chinese population.

Burke’s work played entirely on a literary fascination with this fairly conventional cast of stereotypes; Chinese opium dens, the mysterious Chinese femme fatale, of innocent (and more importantly, white) belles corrupted and hypnotised into an underworld controlled by an evil Chinese presence. Did any of this actually exist, or was this myth created out of the public reaction to police stories that, parallel to the way black people were treated in America at the beginning of last century, simply needed to find a culprit? Between the Great War and the 1930s, Limehouse, and what has been called it’s ghostly double ‘Chinatown’, became this imagined dangerous and exotic place in British literature.

East London today is an eclectic (however much I hate to use that word to describe anything) mix of nouveau artistic riche and traditional working-class communities, the estates of Tower Hamlets, to the stainless steel of Hoxton Square, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, the entire riverside district of East London was effectively a slum. Limehouse was distinctive from the poverty of Bethnal Green or Shoreditch, in its cosmopolitan maritime connection, housing a population of sailors from all over the world. Whilst the numbers of Chinese in London were small in comparison (and I mean a matter of hundreds), around forty percent of the Chinese officially resident in London pre-1914 were in and around the birds-nest network of Limehouses’ alleyways and streets. It becomes apparent, when you walk through the West End, under the bright painted archways of 2010’s ‘Chinatown’, that the existence of a Chinese community in Limehouse was short-lived. As the port declined and shipping slumped, the Chinese population disappeared with them, until the Second World War literally blitzed the rest. The families who did survive were moved to the relative safety of the West End, and the rest, as they say, is history. Well…not quite, that would be a rather simplistic view. But for the purposes of this story, we can pretend that life is that black and white.

an. Opium Den
“An establishment where opium is sold and smoked. Opium dens were prevalent in many parts of the world in the 19th Century, most notably China, Southeast Asia, North America and France. Throughout the West, opium dens were frequented by and associated with the Chinese because the establishments were usually run by Chinese who supplied the opium as well as prepared it for visiting non-Chinese smokers. For the working class, there were also many low-end dens with sparse furnishings. These latter dens were more likely to admit non-Chinese smokers” [Wikipedia]

So we’ve established that the London press (thanks mainly to police inadequacy), along with popular British authors such as Burke, were fond of portraying Limehouse as an exotic and dangerous district. Much of this was down to a simplistic connection made easily in the minds of most readers. In the word’s of Yeatman’s character Thomas (undoubtedly a play on Thomas Burke himself), ‘all Chinese people smoke opium don’t they?’

Limehouse’s reputation as an opium-drenched pit of mystery creates a fantastic basis for fiction (and I use that word deliberately). Upon the infinitely small population of Chinese that existed in Limehouse, was heaped notoriety for opium-induced sordidness and debauchery, a topic which would effectively titillate British readers enticed by the shock factor that a mixture of ‘foreigners’ and drugs could bring. Whilst history struggles to prove this – scholars have yet to unearth a single historical photograph of opium smokers in London at the time – it is simply more interesting to believe it was true.

After stepping out of the theatre (or town hall), one of my friends turned and asked me, ‘is it odd that I’ve never been offered opium?’. As we talked about it we realised that, whilst opium in its myriad of forms of heroin is prevalent on the streets of London, opium doesn’t seem to feature as much in popular culture. I then found myself wondering how quickly this was going to change with the deepening links between the UK and Afghanistan. Links is probably not the most descriptive word to choose here, too many lives have been lost over this ‘relationship’ for it to be described with such simplicity, but I didn’t set out on this piece to exhaust the political aspects of the ‘war in Afghanistan’, nor describe how opium destruction if fuelling the Taliban insurgency (and here I go off on a tangent again…)

But it has to feature. Myth or mystery in Limehouse, opium is fast becoming a simple way of life for many Afghans. Despite years of attempted burning of the poppy fields in Afghanistan, drug addiction still remains a fact of daily life. From children as young as two months, who are given it to stop crying, to grandparents using it to quell the labour pains of working on the country’s (second?) most famous export – carpets. It can take up three months of 10-hour days working to create one of Afghanistan’s traditional and beautiful rugs, and it is opium that keeps them going. Cheaper than medicine, it becomes it’s substitution. In the middle of the Turkmen desert in Afghanistan’s far north, doctors and pharmaceuticals simply don’t exist. The rare addiction centres that do exist contain wards sometimes filled with three generations of one family, from a 2-month old baby to his mother and grandmother, forced to go ‘cold turkey’. This habit can then easily develop into a heroin addiction for many of the migrant workers who are paid, not in money, but in substance. Whilst the number of addicts has doubled in just a handful of years, wiping out a single field can destroy the income of a family of 12.

The BBC’s Ian Pannell quantifies the extent of the problem in Afghanistan, “Afghans sit at the wrong end of many league tables: it is one of the poorest countries in the world, also one of the most corrupt and violent, and it sits right at the very top in terms of opium production. More than 90% of opium and heroin originates here…Afghanistan has the highest relative rate of addiction of any country in the world.” Opium may have been rife in the streets of Limehouse at the end of World War One, or it may have been imagined. With the growing reliance of Afghan people on the drug, both for personal use, and survival-by-export, I think it’s going to take less imagination to see it on the streets of London in the near future.

Emily Akers



Yeatman’s first solo written-and-directed piece provides the latest production from Kandinsky, one of London’s most significant emerging theatre companies. Self described as the first company to ‘develop and produce plays that bridge the gap between art and science’, Kandinsky has had a weighted impact in Edinburgh, at consecutive Fringe Festivals, but has also featured heavily in London where it began work seven months ago on Limehouse Nights. For more information please visit http://www.kandinsky-online.com/